Tous les articles par Alain Préat

Full-time professor at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium apreat@gmail.com apreat@ulb.ac.be • Department of Earth Sciences and Environment Res. Grp. - Biogeochemistry & Modeling of the Earth System Sedimentology & Basin Analysis • Alumnus, Collège des Alumni, Académie Royale de Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux Arts de Belgique (mars 2013). http://www.academieroyale.be/cgi?usr=2a8crwkksq&lg=fr&pag=858&rec=0&frm=0&par=aybabtu&id=4471&flux=8365323 • Prof. Invited, Université de Mons-Hainaut (2010-present-day) • Prof. Coordinator and invited to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium (Belgian College) (2009- present day) • Prof. partim to the DEA (third cycle) led by the University of Lille (9 universities from 1999 to 2004) - Prof. partim at the University of Paris-Sud/Orsay, European-Socrates Agreement (1995-1998) • Prof. partim at the University of Louvain, Convention ULB-UCL (1993-2000) • Since 2015 : Member of Comité éditorial de la Revue Géologie de la France http://geolfrance.brgm.fr • Since 2014 : Regular author of texts for ‘la Revue Science et Pseudosciences’ http://www.pseudo-sciences.org/ • Many field works (several weeks to 2 months) (Meso- and Paleozoic carbonates, Paleo- to Neoproterozoic carbonates) in Europe, USA (Nevada), Papouasia (Holocene), North Africa (Algeria, Morrocco, Tunisia), West Africa (Gabon, DRC, Congo-Brazzaville, South Africa, Angola), Iraq... Recently : field works (3 to 5 weeks) Congo- Brazzaville 2012, 2015, 2016 (carbonate Neoproterozoic). Degree in geological sciences at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in 1974, I went to Algeria for two years teaching mining geology at the University of Constantine. Back in Belgium I worked for two years as an expert for the EEC (European Commission), first on the prospecting of Pb and Zn in carbonate environments, then the uranium exploration in Belgium. Then Assistant at ULB, Department of Geology I got the degree of Doctor of Sciences (Geology) in 1985. My thesis, devoted to the study of the Devonian carbonate sedimentology of northern France and southern Belgium, comprised a significant portion of field work whose interpretation and synthesis conducted to the establishment of model of carbonate platforms and ramps with reefal constructions. I then worked for Petrofina SA and shared a little more than two years in Angola as Director of the Research Laboratory of this oil company. The lab included 22 people (micropaleontology, sedimentology, petrophysics). My main activity was to interpret facies reservoirs from drillings in the Cretaceous, sometimes in the Tertiary. I carried out many studies for oil companies operating in this country. I returned to the ULB in 1988 as First Assistant and was appointed Professor in 1990. I carried out various missions for mining companies in Belgium and oil companies abroad and continued research, particularly through projects of the Scientific Research National Funds (FNRS). My research still concerns sedimentology, geochemistry and diagenesis of carbonate rocks which leads me to travel many countries in Europe or outside Europe, North Africa, Papua New Guinea and the USA, to conduct field missions. Since the late 90's, I expanded my field of research in addressing the problem of mass extinctions of organisms from the Upper Devonian series across Euramerica (from North America to Poland) and I also specialized in microbiological and geochemical analyses of ancient carbonate series developing a sustained collaboration with biologists of my university. We are at the origin of a paleoecological model based on the presence of iron-bacterial microfossils, which led me to travel many countries in Europe and North Africa. This model accounts for the red pigmentation of many marble and ornamental stones used in the world. This research also has implications on the emergence of Life from the earliest stages of formation of Earth, as well as in the field of exobiology or extraterrestrial life ... More recently I invested in the study from the Precambrian series of Gabon and Congo. These works with colleagues from BRGM (Orléans) are as much about the academic side (consequences of the appearance of oxygen in the Paleoproterozoic and study of Neoproterozoic glaciations) that the potential applications in reservoir rocks and source rocks of oil (in collaboration with oil companies). Finally I recently established a close collaboration with the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium to study the susceptibility magnetic signal from various European Paleozoic series. All these works allowed me to gain a thorough understanding of carbonate rocks (petrology, micropaleontology, geobiology, geochemistry, sequence stratigraphy, diagenesis) as well in Precambrian (2.2 Ga and 0.6 Ga), Paleozoic (from Silurian to Carboniferous) and Mesozoic (Jurassic and Cretaceous) rocks. Recently (2010) I have established a collaboration with Iraqi Kurdistan as part of a government program to boost scientific research in this country. My research led me to publish about 180 papers in international and national journals and presented more than 170 conference papers. I am a holder of eight courses at the ULB (5 mandatory and 3 optional), excursions and field stages, I taught at the third cycle in several French universities and led or co-managed a score of 20 Doctoral (PhD) and Post-doctoral theses and has been the promotor of more than 50 Masters theses.
climate-debate

The Media Are Deliberately Lying About Climate Change And Hurricanes

by M. Schellenberg, Oct 4, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Over the last several weeks, many mainstream news media outlets have claimed that hurricanes are becoming more expensive, more frequent, and more intense because of climate change. [bold, links added]

• The Financial Timesreported that “hurricane frequency is on the rise.”

• The New York Timesclaimed, “strong storms are becoming more common in the Atlantic Ocean.”

• The Washington Postsaid, “climate change is rapidly fueling super hurricanes.”

• ABC Newsdeclared, “Here’s how climate change intensifies hurricanes.”

• Both the FT and NY Times showed graphs purporting to show rising hurricane frequency using data from the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

All those claims are false.

The increasing cost of hurricane damage can be explained entirely by more people and more property in harm’s way. Consider how much more developed Miami Beach is today compared to a century ago. Once you adjust for rising wealth, there is no trend of increasing damage.

Claims that hurricanes are becoming more frequent are similarly wrong.

“After adjusting for a likely undercount of hurricanes in the pre-satellite era,” writes NOAA, “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s.”

What’s more, NOAA expects a 25% decline in hurricane frequency in the future.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Weather Disasters Wrongly Linked To Global Warming By Two International Agencies

by P. Homewood, Oct 4, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

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Because the data is compiled from the same EM-DAT da­tabase, the annual number of deaths shows an uptick from the 1990s to the 2000s. It is clear though that disaster-related deaths from extreme weather have been falling since the 1920s and are now approaching zero. This is due as much to improved planning, more robust structures and early warning systems, as it is to diminishing numbers of natural disasters. And, as can be seen from the figure, it is earthquakes – entirely natural events – that have been the deadliest disasters over the last two decades.

Ignoring all the evidence, however, the press release accompanying the latest WMO report proclaims that “Climate science is clear: we are heading in the wrong direction,” the UN Secretary-General adding, with characteristic hype, that the report “shows climate impacts heading into uncharted territory of destruction.”

A more detailed discussion of the erroneous claims of both CRED and the WMO can be found in my two most recent reports on weather extremes (here and here).

better to know...?, climate-debate

New Study Affirms Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions Play No Role In Larsen Ice Shelf Melt

by K. Richard, Oct 3, 2022 in NoTricksZone

There are four main reasons why Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf may be melting. None of them involve human forcing or CO2 concentration changes.

Scientists have recently completed an exhaustive 20-year study of the “most significant causes of melting” of the Larsen C Ice Shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula. They have concluded the 4 main surface melt drivers are:

1. Shortwave solar radiation.

2. Foehn wind variations.

3. Cloud cover changes.

4. Natural circulation variations (SAM, ENSO).

Neither anthropogenic forcing nor CO2 emissions are listed as causal factors in Antarctic ice melt processes.

 

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In other words, there is nothing even remotely unusual about any Antarctic ice melt or climate trends that cannot be explained by or attributed to natural, non-anthropogenic processes.

better to know...?, climate-debate

Notable US Hurricanes In History

by P. Homewood, Oct 1, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

Graphs only tell part of the story when it comes to hurricanes. They give the numbers, but don’t give much idea of the devastation they bring.

The National Hurricane Center has produced a list of some of the most notable hurricanes to hit the US:

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https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/outreach/history/#camille

I won’t reprint the whole  list, but it’s worth a read.

The list certainly is not all-inclusive. There are many more which could have been added, such as the 150 mph Indianola hurricane in 1886,  and Carla in 1961, the 8th and 9th most intense hurricanes on record.

But the list gives a good impression of how catastrophic US hurricanes have always been.

The timeline I have prepared below just covers the period 1900 to 1969 and summarises just how frequent these disastrous hurricanes actually are.

climate-debate

There Is No Detectable Link Between Greenland’s Climate And Atmospheric CO2 Changes

by K. Richard, Sep 29, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Greenland’s climate changes are remarkably uncorrelated with climate model expectations and changes in atmospheric CO2.

When CO2 levels were in the mid-200s parts per million (11.7 to 4.5 thousand years ago) the Arctic and northern Greenland were 2-4°C warmer than now, ice margins were 80 km behind today’s, ice-free open water conditions prevailed, and Greenland warmed 10°C in just 60 years (Elnegaard Hansen et al., 2022).

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Past interglacial CO2 levels of only 280 ppm were associated with a “nearly ice free” Greenland and the presence of flora and fauna in subarctic terrestrial environments 1000 km northwards of where they can survive today, implying “at least 5°C higher temperatures” (Bennike and Böcher, 2021). Summer sea water temperatures were as much as “7-8°C higher than at present”.

climate-debate

After Hurricane Ian: No Trend in Florida Landfalls, Global Activity Trending Down

by Dr R. Spencer, Sep 29, 2022 in WUWT

With Hurricane Ian (now a tropical storm) exiting the east coast of Florida, there is no shortage of news reports tying this storm to climate change. Even if those claims actually include data to support their case, those data are usually for cherry-picked regions and time periods. If global warming is causing a change in tropical cyclone activity, it should show up in global statistics.

The latest peer-reviewed study (March 2022, here) of the accumulated wind energy in tropical cyclones since 1990 (when we started have sufficient global data) showed a decrease in hurricane activity. There was an increase in Atlantic activity, but this was matched by an even larger decrease in Pacific activity, due to a shift from El Nino to La Nina conditions during that time.

So, yes, there is climate change involved in the uptick in Atlantic activity in recent decades. But it’s natural.

Looking at just the numbers of global hurricanes since 1980, we see no obvious trends.

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climate-debate

Global temperature hiatus may not have ended after all, new study suggests

by D. Whitehouse, Sep 23, 2022 in NetZeroWatch

The so-called hiatus in global annual average temperature between 2002 – 2014, once controversial to some but now well-established in the peer-reviewed literature, ended in 2014 with the start of a series of record-breaking El Nino events that spiked global temperature with a subsequent fall-back. Now a new study into the effect of man-made aerosol pollution adds to likely reasons for the end of the hiatus, and may point to lower estimates for future global warming.

An international research team writing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, uses satellite data to show that concentrations of aerosol particles have decreased significantly since 2000. This is good news as cleaner air benefits health, but it also reduces particles’ which have a cooling effect on the terrestrial climate.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by 2019 the global temperature had risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels due to increasing greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels. At the same time the combustion of fossil fuels emit aerosols which cool our climate by reflecting sunlight and increasing the reflectivity of clouds.

Professor Johannes Quaas, a meteorologist at Leipzig University, and colleagues from Europe, China, and the US have published robust observational evidence of significant reduction of aerosol pollution and improved global air quality.

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climate-debate

Study: Climate Skeptics Tend To Have ‘High Analytical Abilities’

by A. Bolt, Sep 29, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Sky News host Andrew Bolt says doubting climate change has become a “mental condition.”

Mr. Bolt says a study of 390 people by psychologist Dr. Rachael Sharman shows those who “suffer from this disorder” of not believing climate change are typically older, conservative, and have “lower environmental values.” [bold, links added]

“Sharman does admit to one thing she got wrong: she says she didn’t expect this,” he said.

“Says it’s contrary to our predictions, but, oh, people with high analytical abilities were even more likely to be skeptical.”

Mr. Bolt said Dr. Sharman did not question why “people who are great at analyzing things are more skeptical of global warming preachers.”

“She says we’ve seen ‘predictions not becoming reality’ and ‘climate change alarmists’ predictions being completely false,” he said.

“Spot on.”

climate-debate

48 Of 79 ‘Catastrophic Climate’ Predictions Have Failed; Other 31 Haven’t Expired Yetrd,

by K. Richard,  Apr 9, 2021 in ClimateChangeDispatch

A new peer-reviewed paper published in the International Journal of Global Warmingidentifies 79 “apocalyptic” predictions formulated since 1970 by “researchers and activists” who “predict cataclysmic events” resulting from “catastrophic climate change.”

Already 48 of these “truly apocalyptic forecasts” have failed. The other 31 are likely just as wrong, but the prediction end dates haven’t expired yet, as “the apocalypse is always about 20 years out.”

Rode and Fischbeck are “professors of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy” at Carnegie Mellon University.

In a new paper and press release (surprisingly published in AAAS) they have effectively exposed a “string of repeated apocalyptic forecast failures” over the last 50 years made by such activists/scientists as Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich, and Tim Flannery.

Activists/scientists James Hansen and Michael Mann have catastrophic predictions set to expire in the 2030s, and the IPCC had a cataclysmic forecast already fail and 3 others that will expire in 2029 and 2050 (2).

The authors’ intention was to warn the climate science community about the cry-wolf dangers of repeatedly making “extreme climate forecasts” that, when they inevitably fail, “undermine the trust in the underlying science.”

It is highly likely that these warnings will be ignored, however, as “making sensational predictions of the doom of humanity, while scientifically dubious, has still proven tempting for those wishing to grab headlines.”

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unclassified

Key phases of human evolution coincide with flickers in eastern Africa’s climate

by University of Cologne, Sep 26, 2022 in ScienceDaily

Three distinct phases of climate variability in eastern Africa coincided with shifts in hominin evolution and dispersal over the last 620,000 years, an analysis of environmental proxies from a lake sediment record has revealed. The project explores the youngest chapter in human evolution by analysing lacustrine sediments in close vicinity to paleo-anthropological key sites in eastern Africa using scientific deep drilling. The research endeavour included more than 22 researchers from 19 institutions in 6 countries, and was led by Dr Verena Foerster at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Geography Education. The article ‘Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution’ has now appeared in Nature Geoscience.

Despite more than half a century of hominin fossil discoveries in eastern Africa, the regional environmental context of the evolution and dispersal of modern humans and their ancestors is not well established. Particularly for the Pleistocene (or Ice Age) between 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, there are no continuous high-resolution paleo-environmental records available for the African continent.

The research team extracted two continuous 280-metre sediment cores from the Chew Bahir Basin in southern Ethiopia, an area where early humans lived and developed during the Pleistocene. Chew Bahir is very remotely situated in a deep tectonic basement in close vicinity to the Turkana area and the Omo-Kibish, key paleo-anthropological and archaeological sites. The cores yielded the most complete record for such a long period ever extracted in the area, revealing how different climates influenced the biological and cultural transformation of humans inhabiting the region.

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Journal Reference:

Verena Foerster, Asfawossen Asrat, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Erik T. Brown, Melissa S. Chapot, Alan Deino, Walter Duesing, Matthew Grove, Annette Hahn, Annett Junginger, Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr, Christine S. Lane, Stephan Opitz, Anders Noren, Helen M. Roberts, Mona Stockhecke, Ralph Tiedemann, Céline M. Vidal, Ralf Vogelsang, Andrew S. Cohen, Henry F. Lamb, Frank Schaebitz & Martin H. Trauth. Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution. Nature Geoscience, 2022 DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-01032-y

climate-debate

What Happened To The Ice-Free Arctic?

by P. Homewood, Sep 26, 202 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

I wonder how these predictions worked out? (Answers tomorrow!!)

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections. “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC.

“So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7139797.stm

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.See also: The Ice Free Arctic – Part II

energy and fields

How Europe Stumbled Into an Energy Catastrophe

by B. Hart,  Sep 13, 2022 in Intelligencer

Since debuting on Substack in the spring of 2021, Doomberg — an anonymous group of writers whose avatar is a distinctive green chicken — has become one of the most popular financial publications on the site. The team has also become a prominent and distinctive voice on finance Twitter (a.k.a. FinTwit). Doomberg’s writers, who come from the world of commodities and heavy industry, deliver deeply informed, often withering analysis that focuses largely on energy policy, their area of expertise. Befitting the site’s name, they often take a darker (or perhaps just more realistic) view than many mainstream sources. Doomberg has been particularly bearish — and prescient — about the unfolding energy crisis in Europe, warning for months that the decision by European leaders to cut off Vladimir Putin from their markets after his invasion of Ukraine risked causing an economic crisis. I spoke via Zoom with one of the Doomberg writers (as represented by that green chicken) about how Russia’s oil industry has thrived despite sanctions, where Europe’s energy squeeze is headed, and why his site is, despite appearances, fundamentally optimistic.

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climate-debate

Trend Change? Greenland Ice Mass Loss Has Been Decelerating Since 2012

by P. Gosselin, Sep 24, 2022 in NoTricksZone

We have digitized the Polar Portal’s graph of the accumulated surface mass balance and have come up with a value of 467 Gt. That’s 100 Gt or 27% above the 1981…2010 mean! Together with the melting of icebergs (assuming the value of the previous year, which was already 10% more than that of 2020 ) this results in approximately the representation below, which was included in the publication until the report 2020.

In 2021, one has probably omitted for reasons, perhaps the jump was difficult to explain by the calving of icebergs?

The total mass balance is very likely -100 Gt. An “accelerated” thawing of the Greenland ice sheet is not to be recognized. If one accumulates the mass loss, one sees the “braking” very nicely. Acceleration occurred until 2012.

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climate-debate

Global temperature hiatus may not have ended after all, new study suggests

by Dr D. Whitehouse, Sep 23, 2022 in NetZeroWatch

The so-called hiatus in global annual average temperature between 2002 – 2014, once controversial to some but now well-established in the peer-reviewed literature, ended in 2014 with the start of a series of record-breaking El Nino events that spiked global temperature with a subsequent fall-back. Now a new study into the effect of man-made aerosol pollution adds to likely reasons for the end of the hiatus, and may point to lower estimates for future global warming.

An international research team writing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, uses satellite data to show that concentrations of aerosol particles have decreased significantly since 2000. This is good news as cleaner air benefits health, but it also reduces particles’ which have a cooling effect on the terrestrial climate.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by 2019 the global temperature had risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels due to increasing greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels. At the same time the combustion of fossil fuels emit aerosols which cool our climate by reflecting sunlight and increasing the reflectivity of clouds.

Professor Johannes Quaas, a meteorologist at Leipzig University, and colleagues from Europe, China, and the US have published robust observational evidence of significant reduction of aerosol pollution and improved global air quality.

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When taken together with a couple of super-strong El Nino events which temporarily drove up global temperature (see graph below), the new findings suggest that the global warming hiatus — clearly evident prior to 2014 — may not have ended yet. If NASA’s satellite data are confirmed, it would suggest that much of the very moderate changes in global temperature this century may have been driven primarily by cleaner air and naturally-occurring El Ninos.

Global temperature changes 2000-2022. Source: Met Office/HadCRUT5
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better to know...?

India, China Emissions Make Mockery of Western Policies

by  V. Jayaraj, Sep 23, 2022 in CO2Coalition

Amidst the European energy crisis, it’s easy to miss other events that are of significance to the discussion about the climate-change movement.

Among them are a series of setbacks to green policies in China and India.

These countries — representing three billion people — have delayed implementation of renewable energy commitments and aggressively increased the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Chinese and Indian leaders — along with their counterparts from Russia and Turkey — explicitly declared that they cannot be coerced into reducing fossil fuel consumption, calling for an “increased investment in oil and gas production and exploration.”

As usual, the mainstream media neither published this news in headlines nor discussed how the proliferation of fossil fuels in these countries make the so-called net zero measures in the West irrelevant to the objectives of climate alarmists.

As the world’s second biggest coal user and home to 1.3 billion people, India has deemphasized its commitment to transitioning to renewable energy.

According to reports, the country fell significantly short of its solar-installation targets, jeopardizing its overall transition goals.

India’s Economic Times reported that at least 25 gigawatts (GW) of solar power projects that were expected to be operational or nearly complete faced delays or uncertainties.

The deferrals of solar installations now make it impossible to attain the planned addition of 450 GW in renewable capacity by 2030.

The Times says India “added 10 GW of solar capacity in 2021, while it needs to add close to 30 GW every year to be able to meet the target.”

The National Solar Mission — India’s internationally renowned solar energy strategy — is in disarray, with only half its promised capacity in place.

India considers coal plants an integral part of its energy sector.

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climate-debate

The Climate Scaremongers: The Great Arctic Sea Ice Scam

by P. Homewood, Sep 23, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

 

 

For years the ‘experts’ have been telling us that the Arctic would soon be ice-free in summer.

Al Gore notoriously warned us in 2009 that ‘there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.’

He was, of course, just a politician. But a whole host of supposed Arctic scientists were all busy issuing similar warnings at the time. [bold, links added]

In 2007, for instance, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told us that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just five to six years.

In December of that year, Jay Zwally of Nasa agreed, giving the ice till 2012. A year later, in 2008 Professor David Barber went one step further, saying the ice would all be gone that very summer.

For sheer persistence in getting it wrong, however, the prize must go to Peter Wadhams, professor and head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge:

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• In 2012, he predicted that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2015/16.

• In 2014, he thought it might last till 2020.

• In 2016, he confidently predicted the Arctic would be ice-free that summer (though curiously he now defined ‘ice-free’ as less than 1 million square kilometers).

All these pronouncements were designed for political propaganda purposes, not for scientific reasons, and were widely propagated by the gullible media.

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climate-debate

The Winter Gatekeeper Hypothesis (VII). A summary plus Q&A

by J. Vinos and A. May, Sep 22, 2022 in ClimateEtc.

“On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands climate change.” J. Vinós, paraphrasing Richard Feynman’s words about quantum mechanics.

7.1 Introduction

This plain-language summary has been written at the request of some readers of our series of articles on the Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis:

Climate is extremely complex, and people, including scientists, have a natural tendency to look for simple explanations. The Occam’s Razor principle is a good first approach but climate change cannot have a simple answer. Over the past seven years, one of the authors of this series (JV) has been laboriously reading many thousands of scientific articles and analyzing hundreds of climate datasets trying to understand how Earth’s climate changes naturally. This is a first step to understanding the human impact on climate change. The outcome of this work is the book “Climate of the Past, Present and Future.” It is a graduate-student level academic book that discusses many controversial issues about natural climate change over the past 800,000 years. In this book, a new hypothesis on natural climate change is presented. It relates changes in the strength of the meridional (poleward) transport of energy with climatic changes that have taken place, both in the past and recently.

The book can be downloaded here (open access) Vinos-CPPF(2022)

climate-debate

How Can The Globe Be Warming When Most Of The Southern Hemisphere Isn’t?

by K. Richard, Sep 22, 2022 in NoTricksZone

New research continues to document non-warming and even “robust cooling” trends for entire regions of the Southern Hemisphere in recent decades.

Land surface temperature data compilations from the Southern Hemisphere (South America, Southwestern Andes, Tasmania, New Zealand, Australia) indicate that any warming during the 20th century occurred before 1980, with no obvious net warming since (Rezsöhazy et al., 2022).

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Sea surface temperature data from the Southeastern Indian Ocean, Tasman Sea, and Great Barrier Reef region indicate no net warming since 1982 (Chapman et al., 2022).

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A 2021 study reported a profound cooling trend for most of Antarctica in recent decades, with amplitudes of -2.8°C for East Antarctica and -1.68°C for West Antarctica during 1979-2018.

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climate-debate

Natural Oceanic Cycles Behind Heavy East Australia Rains, New Study Finds

by P. Gosselin, Sep 21, 2022 in WUWT/NTZ

East Australia got hit by lots of rain in February earlier this year, and the media of course blamed it all on manmade climate change.

Now a new study by Holgate et al (2022) titled “The Impact of Interacting Climate Modes on East Australian Precipitation Moisture Sources” shows East Australia’s rains are directly tied to natural oceanic patterns.

Hat-tip: EIKE.

The paper’s abstract summarizes that east Australia precipitation is driven by multiple interacting climate modes and that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) modifies the supply of evaporative moisture for precipitation and that this is modulated by the Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) and southern annular mode (SAM).

Sources of moisture in eastern Australia. Source: Holgate et al, 2020…
better to know...?

Environmentalism Is A Fundamentalist Religion Steeped In Green Dogma

by J. Kotkin, Sep 21, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Today’s climate activists resemble nothing so much as a religious movement, with carbon the new devil’s spawn.

The green movement is increasingly wedded to a kind of carbon fundamentalism that is not only not realistic but will reduce living standards in the West and around the world.

And as with other kinds of religious fundamentalism, the climate hysteria is often overwrought and obviously so; a decade ago, the same activists predicted a planetary disaster by 2020 if the U.S. and China did not reduce their emissions by 80 percent—which of course never happened. [bold, links added]

This approach is a losing one that reduces the effectiveness of the green lobby. What’s needed to combat climate change is a pragmatic approach based on adapting to real and verifiable dangers.

And this starts with environmentalists acknowledging the limits of our ability to curb emissions in the short run. This is not to cede the fight. The reality is what we do in the West means increasingly little.

Today’s biggest emitters come from China, which already emits more GHG than the U.S. and the EU combined, while the fast growth in emissions comes increasingly from developing countries like India, now the world’s third-largest emitter.

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better to know...?, energy and fields

Ronald Stein on the Huge Advantages of Fossil Fuels Over Wind/Solar Power, Tom Nelson Podcast

by C. Rotter, Sep 20, 2022 in WUWT

Ronald Stein, P.E. is an engineer and Founder of PTS Advance, drawing upon decades of project management and business development experiences. He is an internationally published columnist, energy expert, and Pulitzer Prize nominated author who writes frequently about all aspects of energy and economics and is a Policy Advisor for The Heartland Institute.

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More about Stein: https://www.heartland.org/about-us/wh…
Stein’s website: https://energyliteracy.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PTSFounder
—
Tom Nelson’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tan123
Substack: https://tomn.substack.com/
About Tom: https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2022/0…
Notes for climate skeptics:
https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2019/0…
ClimateGate emails:
https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/p/clim…

unclassified

Does this explode the great global warming myth?

by P. Homewood, Sep 21, 20022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

THE ‘greenhouse effect’ has been with us for so long that it is taken as ‘settled’ science in most quarters. However, as a new paper shows, there is much still to debate.

The author, William Kininmonth, is no bedroom blogger. As a former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre, he deserves careful and respectful attention.

Kininmonth’s suggestion is that the approach of the UN’s  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on a concept of radiation forcing at the top of the atmosphere, is logically unsound and ignores important details about what happens at the Earth’s surface. In particular, he notes that there are huge flows of energy – vastly bigger than the effect of greenhouse gases – from the warm tropical oceans to the atmosphere, whence it is transported poleward by the winds, warming the northern latitudes.

Read the full story here.

better to know...?, climate-debate

Press Release: Important new paper challenges IPCC’s claims about climate sensitivity

by P. Homewood, Sep 20, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

London, 20 September – A new paper reduces the estimate of climate sensitivity – the amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations – by one third. The results therefore suggest that future global warming will be much less than expected.
The paper, by independent scientist Nic Lewis, has just appeared in the journal Climate Dynamics. It is an important challenge to the official view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Lewis has critiqued a 2020 assessment of climate sensitivity by Sherwood et al., which strongly influenced the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, in 2021. Lewis commented:
“It is unfortunate that Sherwood et al.’s assessment of climate sensitivity, which underpinned the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, contained such serious errors, inconsistencies and deficiencies in its methods”.
After correcting the Sherwood et al. methods and revising key input data to reflect, primarily, more recent evidence, the central estimate for climate sensitivity comes down from 3.1°C per doubling of CO2 concentration in the original study to 2.16°C in the new paper.
This large reduction shows how sensitive climate sensitivity estimates still are to input assumptions, and that values between 1.5°C and 2°C remain quite plausible.

  • Climate sensitivity represents the long-term global temperature increase caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. There are different measures of climate sensitivity. Both the Sherwood and Lewis papers estimate the so-called ‘effective’ climate sensitivity, which reflects a new equilibrium state projected from centennial changes after a doubling of the CO2 concentration. This measure is considered the most relevant one for predicting climate change in the coming two centuries.
  • Climate sensitivity has always been a very important, but also highly uncertain, parameter in the climate change discourse. Earlier IPCC reports assessed its value as likely to be somewhere between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, with a best estimate of 3°C. However, prompted by the Sherwood paper, the 2021 Sixth Assessment Report moved that range upwards, to 2.5 to 4°C. Although for outsiders this might sound boring, for insiders it was a revolutionary change.
  • Lewis’s corrections and revisions lead to a likely range of 1.75 to 2.7°C, which is not only lower but is also much less uncertain than either the 2021 official IPCC assessment or the very similar Sherwood et al. estimate (2.6 to 3.9°C).
  • Nic Lewis is the lead or sole author of ten peer-reviewed papers on climate sensitivity. He was a participant in the 2015 workshop that kicked off the World Climate Research Programme project that led to the Sherwood et al. 2020 paper, but he was not a co-author of that paper.

Lewis commented:
“The substantial reduction in assessed climate sensitivity upon updating key input data suggests that the increase in the bottom of the climate sensitivity range in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report was unjustified”.
Lewis’s paper is entitled ‘Objectively combining climate sensitivity evidence’. It can be freely downloaded here. A detailed explanatory article about the paper is available here.

Australia

Emissions from Australia’s oil and gas industry rose 20% in first five years of safeguard mechanism

by A. Norton, Sep 20, 2022 in The Guardian

 

 

unclassified

Report: The Earth Has A Changing Climate, Not A Climate Crisis

by W. Manheimer, Sep 19, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The following excerpt is taken from:

Journal of Sustainable Development; Vol. 15, No. 5; 2022
ISSN 1913-9063 E-ISSN 1913-9071
Published by the Canadian Center of Science and Education

Abstract
The emphasis on a false climate crisis is becoming a tragedy for modern civilization, which depends on reliable, economic, and environmentally viable energy. [bold, links added]

The windmills, solar panels, and backup batteries have none of these qualities. This falsehood is pushed by a powerful lobby which Bjorn Lomborg has called a climate industrial complex, comprising some scientists, most media, industrialists, and legislators.

It has somehow managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison. Multiple scientific theories and measurements show that there is no climate crisis.

Radiation forcing calculations by both skeptics and believers show that the carbon dioxide radiation forcing is about 0.3% of the incident radiation, far less than other effects on climate.

Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today.

During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide levels have been all over the place with no correlation between them.

…